The present disclosure relates to a surgery assistance apparatus, method and program for assisting a doctor in determining a region to be excised when an excision is performed on a tubular organ, such as a large intestine and bronchi.
In medical fields, when a diseased part, such as a tumor, is excised in a surgery, the part to be excised is appropriately determined before the surgery by diagnosis based on images. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2001-283191 (Patent Document 1) and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-339644 (Patent Document 2) propose techniques for assisting by a computer. In Patent Document 1 and Patent Document 2, a blood vessel branch that supplies nutrition to a diseased part is identified in a three-dimensional X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) image of a liver by identifying, based on three-dimensional distances between voxels constituting the liver parenchyma and voxels constituting blood vessels running in the liver, a voxel of the blood vessels dominating each of voxels of the liver parenchyma. Further, a set of voxels of the liver parenchyma dominated by the blood vessel branch is determined as a part to be excised.